When most birds fly, you hear a whooshing sound from the air brushing against their wings. Not owls. A unique feather adaptation — a comb-like serration on the tips of an owl’s lead wing — breaks pockets of wind into smaller balls of air that are absorbed by velvety hind feathers. The owl can fly in silence — and its prey rarely hears it coming.
I learned all of this in the Chicago premiere of “Birds of North America,” now showing at A Red Orchid Theatre. The play, penned by Anna Ouyang Moench (“Man of God”), who is perhaps best known for her television writing (Apple TV’s “Severance,” Prime Videos’ “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”), is a poignant two-hander that follows an evolving relationship between a father and daughter who birdwatch.
In the opening scene, when the father, John, deftly played by veteran Chicago actor John Judd, spots the barn owl through binoculars and delivers these facts, I was on edge. Personally, I have no interest in birding. In the beginning, watching John on the suburban Northeastern backyard set created by Morgan Laszlo, and hearing the real sounds of birds through the speakers, I initially did not think the play was for me.
But, like the barn owl, the real message of the play swooped down on me, nearly unnoticed.
The story unfolds over a period of about 10 years from the 2000s to the 2010s. We learn about John, a staunch scientist, and his daughter, Caitlyn, played excellently by Cassidy Slaughter-Mason, who has had trouble finding her footing in her early 20s. It’s clear the two have trouble communicating and birding is the bandage that holds their relationship together when words can’t.
While bird-watching is the activity the characters do, the generational discourse in the dialogue is gripping. John trained as a physician, as did his wife: however, he gave up his career in medicine to dedicate his life to science, spending 25 years working on a vaccine that he never completed.
Caitlyn, on the other hand, graduated from college and took the first job available to her, which to her father’s dismay, resulted in her working as a copy editor for a right-wing online news website.
The tension is palpable. Onstage, and in many cases in real life, millennials like Caitlyn see careers differently than the generation before us. She is not a “right-winger” in the sense that her father would use the term, but she doesn’t believe she is defined as a person by her career. And, the world she lives in is much more expansive yet offers fewer opportunities than his.
The sweet spot of the play is the discussion surrounding these life choices. And the way each character sees the other as selfish. Caitlyn points out that John was allowed to avoid holding a traditional job because he married a high-earning physician. She views his moral compass as a reflection of his own privilege. According to her, only people who already have housing, retirement funds and wealthy spouses are afforded the leisure to sit around and contemplate topics such as climate change or embark on 25 unpaid years doing vaccine research.
Slaughter-Mason’s performance in this production is moving. In the early scenes, she does so much with her silence. As her father imposes his morality or dissatisfaction with her life choices, her eyes and mannerisms convey an immense amount of emotion that the audience catches, but her father misses. Then, after the power turn, she has much more space to voice her inner feelings.
In a scene where she’s had her fourth miscarriage, her father, rather comedically, mansplains miscarriages. His robotic approach to life leads him to use data and numbers to explain to her, the person who physically lost a child, why it’s not so bad. Slaughter-Mason then delivers a gut wrenching recantation of her actual experience. With painstaking detail she describes what she went through, rendering the audience silent. John shrugs it off, telling her she’s fine, and Slaughter-Mason delivers a quick, yet poignant, “I’m not fine,” that resonates through the room.
Director Kristen Fitzgerald has a tough task of balancing the birding with the deep introspective dialogue and handles it admirably. Judd brings life to a character written as an emotional robot, and Slaughter-Mason is like a boxer sparring and trading verbal jabs with her father.
The title of play may allude to birds, but the heart of the show is a duo who love each other and struggle to communicate. As a millennial who has struggled with similar generational conversations, it was refreshing to see these ideas hashed out on stage.